Antwan Anthony likely to be on death row for decades
After receiving the death penalty for the murders of three people in Pitt County, Antwan Anthony is now back at Central Prison in Raleigh and now on death row.
Anthony is the 154th person awaiting execution, but with no scheduled executions on the calendar due to several cases challenging the execution process in North Carolina, it could be decades before Anthony's sentence is carried out.
Pitt County Assistant District Attorney Caroline Lawler says, "Even when the state is actively executing people on death row the appeals process can last 10 15, 20 even longer so it will be a long process. "
A process that started Tuesday with the defense asking for an appeal.
Lawler says, "They'll start the ball rolling on that. They'll request transcripts of everything we did with a fine tooth comb and from jury selection to pre-trial motions to the sentencing phase and you'll be able appeal and they'll appeal on different levels from federal courts."
Anthony is currently serving a minimum of 51 years in prison for a double murder in Edgecombe County where he was convicted of killing two people three weeks before the triple murder in Pitt County.
According to the statute he will not need to finish that sentence before facing the death penalty.
Lawler says, "Once all his appeals are exhausted, the court says no more, the attorney general then certifies to the warden at Central Prison within 90 days of his appeal running."
But that's only if the state has resumed executions by that time.
The last execution in our state was in 2006 after the humanity of lethal injection came into question.
In 2015, the Restoring Proper Justice Act was signed into law, allowing for non-physicians to carry out executions and the contents of the lethal injections to be withheld. Despite that, there are still no executions on the schedule.
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